Ibrahim Fawal's On the Hills of God.

On the Hills of God is a beautifully-written coming-of-age story about a young Palestinian about to graduate from high school just as the homeland he knows and loves falls apart and the world around him is permanently transformed. Ibrahim Fawal's novel tells the story of Yousif Safi, the son of a Christian family living in the fictional town of Ardallah. As a young adult, Yousif is confronted with the challenges of carving out his own path in the world and wrestling with age-old social customs, against the backdrop of an impending war.

Fawal's novel provides a rare and rich portrait of Palestinian life before 1948. The daily life of the residents of Ardallah comes alive in Fawal's eloquent descriptions of family meals, social customs, and street scenes in the town's main square. The reader gains a deeper appreciation of the challenges facing Palestinians in the late 1940s, awakening slowly from the fog of British occupation, and surrounded by Arab nations whose leaders offer little more than thunderous rhetoric in the face of the well-organized and generously-funded Zionist militias intent on establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.

Yousif matures from a young adult whose concerns are limited to his own education and his first love, to a fully-engaged citizen, struggling to find his own voice. Yousif believes in his father's dream of building a hospital for their town, Ardallah, a dream for which his father has worked his entire life. Yet this dream seems like a distant luxury in the shadow of the war that is about to engulf the country. In spite of his loyalty to his father's ideals, Yousif grows impatient with the older generation’s inability to mobilize in the face of the growing threat to their homeland.

He is moved to action by his cousin Basim, a hero and a revolutionary, and he responds to Basim's calls to defend the country against the aggression of Zionist militias. Yet Yousif remains unconvinced that a military response will be successful in saving his country and preserving the life that he knows. At a town meeting following the very gruesome massacre in nearby Deir Yassin, Yousif suggests a diplomatic approach. "One can always fight. But first, let's try talking to them. I don't think the average Jew likes what's happening. We lived together like good neighbors. They were happy and we were happy. Why can't we just go on like before?" (242) In the end, however, the militias that formed the new Israeli army forced more than 700,000 Palestinians from the land that became Israel.

May 15, 2008, will mark the sixtieth anniversary of what Palestinians worldwide continue to experience as the Nakba or catastrophe. Fawal's novel retells the story of the Nakba in a deeply humane voice. Yousif embodies the dashed hopes and lived tragedies of a generation of Palestinians that still languishes in refugee camps or in exile, awaiting a just resolution to the nightmare that has engulfed their lives.